Security News, Vulnerabilities, Data Breaches, Website Security
Posts tagged network solutions
IPhone Apps Every Road Warrior Entrepreneur Needs
Oct 22nd
The Blackberry has been the mainstay of the business world for years. But as we know, the IPhone is eating away at market share. There are over 75,000 apps for the IPhone now and growing steadily. For those who have Blackberry Thumb, you can probably look forward to IPhone Index Finger at some point in the future as you switch away from the Blackberry.
Why should you switch from the Blackberry? Well there may not be a good reason. The Blackberry has a number of apps and it is secure, it has encryption and has been beaten up on the security front like network security assessment and application security testing. It’s ingrained in businesses and Blackberry Enterprise Server is well known to many IT administrators.
The Entrepreneur can use both devices. Let’s assume there are at least some people using the IPhone, what apps should they have in their toolkit? Of the thousands of apps, how can you pick a few that would be beneficial to the Entrepreneur Road Warrior? Well the way I picked them is through word of mouth , that are of benefit to me and comes with network security assessment tools. I travel, work in my car, have meetings at all times of day, I am away from the office for days or weeks.
Take these with a grain of salt and do not send any flame emails. But please send in the apps that you think should be shared with the world or at least readers of this Blog.
Urban Spoon
First up is Urban Spoon. You are thinking, well that’s not some kind of spreadsheet or financial app. What is the business purpose? The lifeblood of the Entrepreneur is networking , managed security services, application security risk assessment and deal making. Where deal making most of the time involves some kind of meal. Urban Spoon can find you restaurants by cuisine, by neighborhood, by cost, by distance. Everything you need for a meeting is the most random city.
AroundMe
In the same vein as Urban Spoon, is AroundMe . Say you are on your way to an important lunch you have setup with a restaurant you found on Urban Spoon but you are almost out of gas. Use AroundMe to find the closed gas station. Or if you need cash to pay for that gas because your Amex Card has been cancelled, find the closest bank.
GoogleMaps
Well this is pretty obvious. But when you are traveling and maybe forgot to bring your Garmin GPS and do not feel like paying the rental company an extra $11.99 a day to rent their GPS , this is just as good.
ReQall
This is a pretty useful app. The developers were one of the www.TiE.org Top 50 companies this year at TiECon. The app captures your voice, translates it to text, organizes your calendar based on your voice messages, integrates into Outlook or Google Calendar and provides memory assistance. It’s great when you have no pen or driving in a car or need a memory reminder.
FlightAware
For the true Road Warrior, there is no road, there is the sky. So when you are rushing to the airport or think you need to rush to the airport, track down what is going on with your flight. Check out FlightAware to get an update and help you plan that trip to the airport.
TweetDeck
Social Media, the latest buzz word, actually has some teeth. Small companies and the Entrepreneur have to be connected to the work whether you like it or not. Twitter is a way of life these days even if people seem to be twittering their lives away. How do you tell your followers that you are stuck in an airport in Baltimore? Try using TweetDeck.
These Apps don’t seem very business-like, but the Entrepreneur is practical, cheap, requires network security audit tools and has to get things done today . These help you achieve your million tasks on a timely basis.
Gary Bahadur
http://twitter.com/kraasecurity
*Managed Security Services
*Vulnerability Management
*Compliance & Policy Development
*PGP Security
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Data Loss, this time with Network Solutions
Jul 27th
Data Loss, this time with Network Solution
Network Solutions, one of the largest domain registrars recently announced a data breach. Malicious code was found on its e-commerce server which may have captured transactions from thousands of websites and capturing half a million or more credit cards. The company said they found the code during a routine check. Since the breach occurred between March 12 and June 8th, how routine was the actual checks? I wonder when their last vulnerability assessment or Information security risk assessment was conducted? Data loss prevention is sorely lacking in just about every industry.
Here is what the company said “At this point, we have no reports or other reasons to believe that any credit card account information has been misused and, under established practice, credit card issuing companies generally will not hold our merchants’ customers liable for any fraudulent purchases made using their credit card account numbers that are reported in a timely way to the issuer,” a statement from the company reads. All these statements around hacker breaches and stolen credit cards read the same.
The process now begins where all the merchants have to be identified, then each merchant has to notify their customers. Their customer then have to work with their banks to stop credit cards, have to get credit monitoring and thus goes the Circle of Life (of data breaches) Here is the list of data breaches in 2009 alone. If you recall the breaches of Heartland Payment Systems and RBS WorldPay, the breachescaused them to be removed from the PCI security audit () list . Well that should be obvious, or should they have been rated compliant int he first place. Known non-compliance might be a better than weak compliance.
The basic question is what was Network Solution not doing to have malicious software installed on key servers? Was it a breach through a web application, was it through malicious email, a browser based attack, some insider who didn’t know enough about security and clicked on the wrong thing? What routine check found it and why wasn’t this check run on a more routine basis, such as weekly or even daily?
At the end of the day, security is a moving target. We can utilize encryption, vulnerability management, application security risk assessment, email filtering, backup and recovery, but all will be useless is we follow poor practices or do not have good procedures in place to take into account the human element. Most breaches are insider problems or mis-configurations or plain old stupidity.
Gary Bahadur
http://www.kraasecurity.com
http://blog.kraasecurity.com
*Managed Security Services
*Vulnerability Management
*Compliance & Policy Development
*PGP Security
*FREE Website Security Test
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